Domiciliary care, or home care, are a range of services that support people while living in their own home. Older people and people with complex needs often move between different care settings, and around 20% of requests for social care support received by Local Authorities in England come from people being discharged from hospital.
This analysis aims to describe the relationship between hospital admissions and domiciliary care use, including
- what proportion of publicly funded domiciliary care packges are associated with discharge from hospital, and
- which groups of hospital patients were at higher risk of requiring domiciliary care after discharge.
This project is a collaboration between Care City and the Health Foundation.
The findings have been published in BMJ Open.
We used the Care City Cohort, a linked dataset of residents of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, which contains household and individual-level data across health services and Barking and Dagenham council.
As the data used for this analysis is not publically available, the code cannot be used to replicate the analysis on this dataset. However, with modifications the code will be able to be used on similar datasets.
This R script joins data from the local authority social care department (including data on domiciliary care) with data about hospital admissions for local residents. It describes the association between hospital discharge and new domiciliary care packages.
These scripts were written in R. The following R packages (available on CRAN) are needed:
- Dan Lewer, UCL
- Jenny Shand, Care City and UCLP
- John Craig, Care City
- Shilpi Begum, Care City
- Fiona Grimm, Health Foundation
- Rafi Roganswatson, University Hospitals Sussex
This project is licensed under the MIT License.